[Travioli]

Hey I am hoping someone can help me with this. Working on my computer the other night and went to bed leaving it on. There was a thunder storm at night but no damage to the computer. When I got up I had to turn the computer on since the power went out due to storm. When I did I got the message you see in the title. So Idid that and nothing. Once I got to work I did some research and found a couple of websites to help make a boo.table floppy disk. http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrmissing.htm. I found the website via google search. So I tried the 3.5" disk and no such luck so another website said to get a version of window's xp which I have professional. I went into the bios and switched 1. remoavble device well actually I disabled it since my CD-rom was not listed there and the second thing is my hard drive, third is my ATAPI CD-ROM and 4th is other boot device. So I have chnaged the bios back and fourth but no avail since I did place the window's xp pro in the cd-rom. I have xp pro installe don my machine. Lot's of hard drive and a ASUS motherboard. Can anyone help I have a lot of material on this computer I cannot afford to lose. Please send some reponses to Travis.Imhof@sanofipasteur.net

Kind Regards and thanks for oyur time

Travis

[cflava5]

i had this problem once and this worked for me fine

1. Insert the Windows XP bootable CD into the computer.
2. When prompted to press any key to boot from the CD, press any key.
3. Once in the Windows XP setup menu press the "R" key to repair Windows.
4. Log into your Windows installation by pressing the "1" key and pressing enter.
5. You will then be prompted for your administrator password, enter that password.
6. Copy the below two files to the root directory of the primary hard disk. In the below example we are copying these files from the CD-ROM drive letter "E". This letter may be different on your computer.

copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\
copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\

7. Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot.

[Travioli]

I just tried one more configuration on the BIOS screen and I got the boot from CD option. Now I have a repair option. I iwl lkeep you posted. What causes this since if you read my above post I really didn't do anything.

Thanks for oyur help

Kind Regards,

Travis

P.S. Right now after I hit r for repair I have two options

1. Type EXIT to quit Recovery Console and restart the computer

2. Which Windows installation would you like to log onto

3. To cancel, press ENTER?

[Travioli]

What is normally the password on a new cd

[cflava5]

the password is usually blank. Just hit enter.

[Travioli]

hey that worked but all it did then was reboot.?

[cflava5]

what happens after you reboot...

[new tech guy]

Well Firstly you should not post your email address like that in a forum as spam bots browse google and if they hit this forum they will pick up your address, add you to it and spam the heck outta ya. But to quickly fix this why not just rebuild the systems boot sector like this which will usually get things rolling again. As stated before Boot from the windows cd> once it loads up press r and when the next screen appears press c for recovery console now that it is loaded usually the windows installation is 1 (reccomend you use the numbers on the top of the screen as if numlock is off the # wont appear and when you press enter the pc will just pointlessly reboot.) then when it asks for the administrator password it is speaking of the account in windows called administrator which usually does not have a password unless the user specifies one. If there is not one just leave the feild blank and press enter. Then the pc will show somthing like this: C:/WINDOWS/ or similar. Pretty much a command prompt in the root directory of the operating system. At this point use these two commands "fixmbr" (no quotes) and "fixboot" (again no quotes) both will have warning screens and at them just press y and it will write a new master boot record and new boot data for the boot sector of the drive. After you run those commands type "exit" into the prompt to restart the pc and then come back and tell us how things are running.

[Travioli]

Thank you for your advice I will try this whenI get home. When I did this last night I entered one and then pressed enter and the system just rebooted and all it was was like a cycle. Iwi ll try it a couple of times and see what happens. What would happen if I was to install XP over my existing XP? Would I lose all my data I previously had?

Thanks,

Travis

[new tech guy]

Did a number 1 appear on the screen when you tried this? An no you will not lose data by doing a repair install of xp but windows will be as if you just installed it and will need all updates and it is possible that many programs will need repair installs but your files will still be there.

[Travioli]

New tech Guy,
When I hit the space bar to boot from CD it went into a blue screen with Windows XP at the top and a bunch of drivers and stuff showing up on the bottom then it switched to a black screen and asked for a number which I typed one and it did show up then I hit enter and then it asked for a password inwhich I hit enter again then it just rebooted again. I was on this website...see first message I posted and when you use the floppy it gives you a list of tenchoice to choose from at certain numbers I got different error messages. One message said hal.dll file misisng so I added that to the floppy and was going to boot from floppy again and select the number option that gave me the hal.dll file missing. Anothe roption gave me ntoskrnl missing. So Iwill see what happens tonight I will try the CD again if that does not work then I will try the floppy and if that does not work I will re-install xp...but what happens if Iuse a borrowed version of this xp then what I originally had? I can just simply not enter the product key code right and I should be fine?


Thanks,

Travis

[new tech guy]

You will have to enter the product key again and as long as the disc is the same type as what is installed on the pc it should take. But have you set a password on the administrator account? If im not mistaken it will reboot like that if you enter a password incorrectly. If you do manage to boot the machine press cntrl+alt+delete twice at the welcome screen you will get a classic logon screen. At this screen if you type in administrator into the username field and do not enter a password does it say that the password is incorrect? If so, then you need to replace the blank with your password to the account. Same in dos as we are trying to log into that same administrator account.

[Travioli]

New Tech Guy,
Was able to do the two commands but when I restart I went back into the Bios to reset it basically so it owuld not just boot from the cd drive I still got the NTLDR error again

[new tech guy]

I would next then try cflava's post again. If that fails you may be looking at doing a repair install of windows.

[Uriel-TOF]

In most cases, all you have to do to fix ntldr is excecute the Fixboot command and the chkdsk command from the recovery console.